Wrongly Accused

In Defense of Lauren Gunderson

[See update 2/05/2026 at the bottom of this article.]

Yesterday, Rhode Island’s Contemporary Theater Company announced that it was preemptively cancelling its slated 2026 production of Lauren Gunderson’s The Revolutionists (along with all Gunderson plays in the future) because Gunderson’s name had cropped up nine times in the U.S. Department of Justice’s recently released Epstein files.

Gunderson has been America’s most produced playwright for the past three years, according to American  Theatre Magazine.

The name of her now estranged husband, Nathan Wolfe, a virologist and former Stanford University Professor, appeared 589 times. (Gunderson has said that their separation preceded this scandal.)

Wolfe invited the now deceased pedophile and sex trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein, to the couple’s wedding reception at Foreign Cinema in 2012 – four years after Epstein had been convicted in Florida in 2008 for procuring a 14-year-old child for prostitution and for soliciting a prostitute. He served almost 13 months in custody with extensive work release. His sentence was completed in 2009; three years later, Wolfe invited him to his and Gunderson’s wedding.

Gunderson posted on social media that she knew nothing about this invitation, that it was on her then-fiancé’s digital contact list, that Epstein never showed up to the reception, that she’s never met him, and how appalled and disgusted she is by yesterday’s revelations.

According to the just released documents, two years before his and Gunderson’s 2012 wedding, Wolfe wrote to Epstein about the “hottie interns from WEF” (The World Economic Forum) and that as a virologist, he was developing a “female Viagra.”

There’s a pattern here, where smart, enlightened women attach themselves to sexually warped if not abusive men, whose behaviors bring the women crashing down with them, personally and professionally.

One such woman, Huma Abedin, was Hillary Clinton’s long-term aide. She was married in 2010 to Democratic U.S. Assemblyman from New York, Anthony Weiner, in a ceremony officiated by none other than Bill Clinton. Weiner, like Wolfe, was known to be a kind of lothario bachelor. The proverbial shit started hitting the fan during Wiener’s New York mayoral campaign in 2013, when evidence started emerging of sexually provocative photos of himself (for example, his erect penis covered by boxer shorts) emailed/texted to women and girls before and during his marriage, resulting in an F.B.I. investigation. He denied ever having a physical relationship with any of these women or girls, though he admitted to poor judgment (an understatement). His divorce to Abedin was finalized in 2025, but not before denting her professional standing, and, by extension, that of Hillary Clinton, whose own husband did not touch “that woman,” he announced while staring boldly into a television camera to a national audience.

This raises three questions:

What gives these men of privilege the hubris to imagine that they are invulnerable to scrutiny for actions and associations that are often illegal and always morally corroded? Perhaps an answer to that lies in the word privilege, and the protection racket that has always swirled around such people but has never been as potent and impenetrable as now. Our two-tier system of justice does not insulate “leftists” and “radicals” (as some of the most privileged and wealthy among us enjoy opining). The two-tier system of justice generally protects the wealthiest and most powerful among us, regardless of their politics. (It always did, but never in the U.S. as much as now.) If you can’t find evidence of that in the way the Epstein files have been distributed, redacted, and withheld, we simply live on different planets.

The likes of Wolfe and Weiner (if only their surnames were not so satirically ironic) suffer from what might be a twitch in their DNA, or their character, or whatever, leading them to the delusion that they are mightier and less disposable than they actually are. That’s the hubris part.

This leads to the second question: What leads these women of substance and intelligence to bond with such corrosive men? Not just for the perverse thrill of a fling, but to wed them? What were they thinking? Was it the attraction to their presumed power and influence? If so, what does this say about them? Their judgement?

This question is compounded by the example of a playwright – the most produced playwright in the United States – whose collected works show such breadth of imagination and wit, with such a fierce intellectual curiosity and knowledge of history. Is it fair to question such a writer, whose plays are so persuasive, for her judgement of character in her personal life?

She constructs characters for the stage, plausible characters. She has an international fan base built upon the trust we have in her to know what the fuck she’s talking about, when it comes to her characters, and the way they behave.

Then it turns out, in her personal life, she’s shocked and appalled by the news that her own husband seems to have been sucking up to a sex trafficker and pedophile. Uhm. Did she actually date this guy before the wedding? Or was it an arranged marriage? There were no clues? Perhaps there were, and she forgave them? Willfully ignored them? There are characters like that in her plays.

This leads to the final, and most, troubling question for me, and it offers a defense of Gunderson, the playwright.

A playwright’s task is often to sort through, to process, ideas and emotions that are percolating within them. Edward Albee once said that he writes a play for the purpose of trying to understand why he’s writing that play. Playwriting can be a sorting out, a probing, a parsing of conflicting ideas and ideals.

I find it terribly unfair to hold a playwright, or any artist, accountable in their personal lives for the works they produce, when their motives of creation might well be to grapple with those very questions: Why do women fall for corrosive men? And vice versa? Or, in the play The Revolutionists, that Contemporary Theater Company chose to cancel, along with every other Gunderson play in the works “until exonerating evidence comes to light,” can Marie Antoinette possibly be empathetic? This is the kind of epic possibility that Gunderson raises in her play.

So this is a rebuttal to my own admonition of Gunderson, and this is where I land on this issue for now:

We are too judgy. As a society. As a culture. Contemporary Theater Company’s first impulse is to cancel Gunderson before the evidence is in. They admit as much. I find that reactive and cowardly. This argument is not in any manner a defense of the horrors that Epstein and his tribe perpetrated on helpless women and children. But Gunderson is not Epstein. She says she never met him, never knew him. Her husband had some correspondences with him. She’s not her husband. They are different people. The theater has rendered her guilty before being proven innocent. Our legal system is supposed to work the other way around, and so are our other institutions.

If we’re to avoid devolving into abject nihilism (perhaps it’s too late for that), it would be prudent of our arts institutions to adhere to some guiding principles. If we’re going to roar in protest when our federal government condemns and demonizes protesters in Minneapolis after they’ve been shot and killed in cold blood on icy streets by federal “agents,” when our own government renders a verdict not only in the absence of evidence, but in the presence of evidence that contradicts their narratives, none of us has any moral prerogative to render such a verdict against a notable American playwright in the absence of evidence that she knew Epstein or was involved whatsoever in his child sex trafficking enterprise.

Where are our guiding principles?

Guilty until proven innocent is no way to run a justice system, or an arts institution, or a country.

The actions of Contemporary Theater Company validate every argument about the “left” indulging in virtue signaling and cancel culture. The federal government is already engaging in cancel culture ten-fold. Let that be their downfall, not ours.

If we can’t get a grip on our guiding principles for justice and apply them uniformly, or try to, then we’re just the skin on the snake that’s eating its own tail.

UPDATE: On February 5, Contemporary Theater Company issued the following statement: